th considered that art should serve society as design and architecture do. Burton's and Puryear's mutual interest in Brancusi's art-cum-craft background is also shared by Richard Pettibone, who has signaled a connection between Brancusi's aesthetic and that of the Shaker community.Pettibone is a pioneer of appropriation art, yet, unlike other artists of his generation who have denounced the pursuit of ideal form, he has unapologetically extolled it. He argues that Brancusi's series of "Endless Columns aspire to a perfection similar to a Shaker chair or a candle stand." This statement can be read as the antinomy within Brancusi's project: that the most significant of his sculptures come close to the economy and integrity of the pedestal. Brancusi's revolutionary reversal of the base from passive podium to generative element has likewise informed Didier Vermeiren, who is best known for his large corpus of works based on the assemblage of two identical pedestals. In Vermeiren's so-called pedestal on top of a pedestal, pedestal and sculpture form replicas of one another. Elevating the element that is ordinarily used for the display of works gauged more valuable, all these artists have cunningly received, aesthetic orders. In the process, they have problematized and restructured the power relations between high and low, aesthetic and functional. Similarly, in different versions of the Endless Column, Brancusi played categories of pedestal against sculpture, and sculpture against architectural unit, until formal and functional elements performed an intricate self-cancellation. Unquestionably, next to the producer of the readymade, Brancusi was a legitimate "transformateur Du Champ."The reversals exercised by Burton, Pettibone, Puryear, and Vermeiren with their point of departure in Brancusi's works have subsequently been extended by younger artists interested not only in subverting prevailing cultural codes, but also in enhancing the ...
